Fire the researchers

Recently after viewing the following survey, fellow South African blogger David Joffe smelled a rat. Basically he felt that his bank, Absa, based on his own experience, was not the most service orientated bank in the country:
(The banks are displayed in red)

Now, there's a service site for South African companies called hellopeter.com, basically consumers go there to either complain about, or compliment various South African companies. David went there and created new data looking at the ratio of complaints to compliments, this tells a different story. Here, Absa comes second last:

What amazes me is that in a recent post I wrote on Jo'blog complaining about Nedbank's service (the worst according to David), a good few of our comments, and the only ones that recommended anything, recommended I switch to FNB (the best according to David). Thus totally in-line with his "non-scientific" study.

The way I see it, the world has changed, the information is there for us all to see. Not the faked out information of the past, but the real deal. I think it's time the research companies stopped with their old-school polls and started looking for the real data. It's quick to find, and not-surprisingly more accurate...!